The Coca - CHAPTER 1 The Coca-Cola Company The larger a...

CHAPTER 1: The Coca-Cola Company The larger a company is, the harder it is to continue to grow at a steady pace. This was the major challenge facing the Coca-Cola Company in the mid-1990s.The U.S. market had already been well developed, with an average of 2968-ounce servings of Coke products consumed by every man, woman, and child. But the company had not introduced a major new product in nearly 10 years. Demand for diet drinks--the fastest growing soft drinks of the 1980s--had leveled off, and demand for cola-flavored drinks had begun to decrease. According to a former Coke executive "The problem was that Diet Coke was driving the engine and everybody was living off that." Meanwhile, the competition had not been sleeping. Pepsi was test-marketing a colorless cola, Crystal Pepsi, in response to consumers' interest in clear flavored waters and seltzers. It had also come out with a new advertizing campaign and slogan. Neither company appeared to be particularly concerned about competition from other soft drink manufacturers. However, consumers were drinking more and more new types of beverages, and traditional juice companies such as Very fine and Ocean Spray had begun to package their products in single-serving cans, in addition to the traditional bottles or juice boxes. Snapple, a regional producer of all-natural drinks, developed a new process for bottling tea that required no preservatives and expanded its product line from juices into seltzers and other natural sodas. Roberto Goizueta, Chief Executive Officer of Coca-Cola Company, recognized the problem. He challenged his new Chief Operating Officer, company president Douglas Ivester, to rejuvenate the Coke brand. Under lvester's direction, Coke’s advertising

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